It hasn’t actually passed, although it almost did. I mean the MOT, for those readers who have not been anxiously following these pages with bated breath and bitten fingernails.
Mark took my taxi for an MOT today. The garage very kindly let us move the time back by a couple of hours when we weren’t ready to be examined at lunchtime, which was the time we had booked. Hence he has not been back very long, bringing with him the news that we are not yet in possession of a shiny new MOT certificate.
We are, however, feeling quietly optimistic.
It passed on everything except the thing that Mark didn’t have time to fix, which was that the ABS light is still on.
He was outside in the alley bashing it about until almost midnight last night, but he wasn’t doing the ABS light. He was doing other things. In the end he went to bed, and had to start again this morning, when he had several things still left to do, and the ABS light was last.
Alas, he did not manage to work out the fault and fix it in time.
Despite this setback, we are feeling quite cheerful, because everything else is done, and sooner or later he will be able to work out what the wretched problem is with the ABS. At that moment we will rush triumphantly back to the MOT station and demand our certificate.
It will probably be fine.
The MOT is not the only certificate looming large on my consciousness at the moment. Cambridge has graciously informed us that we can now graduate if we so wish. I don’t really so wish, because once I have graduated then I really truly won’t be a student any more, and I quite liked being one, but all the same, since the opportunity is there then I am jolly well not going to miss it.
You don’t graduate with people from your course but people from your college. I don’t quite know if anybody else from my course will be graduating on the same day as me, which is the first of March. It is then because you can only graduate on Saturdays, and I had to choose a date before we started getting seasonally busy in the taxis. It might be all very nice to graduate on a glorious June afternoon but it won’t be nice at all if I have to miss a busy weekend at work for the privilege.
It doesn’t cost you anything to graduate, except a massive sum of cash for an hotel for a couple of nights, and the purchase of a hood for your bat-suit.
The hood is an important feature. You have to have a different colour of hood depending on what you have just done. Some of the hoods are quite exciting, there are furry white ones, cherry-coloured ones, pink, gold and purple, and all sorts of magnificent shades.
Mine will be yellow and probably expensive. Everything in Ede and Ravenscroft is expensive.
According to the letter they have sent out we will be obliged to kneel in front of the Vice Chancellor, who is no longer the same one as when I started, which is a pity, because he was my friend. He has gone somewhere else, and I will have to kneel down in front of some substitute that I am not nearly so pleased about. Also the kneeling sounds a bit dodgy, I might borrow some of Mark’s boiler suit kneepads to shove down my tights.
It has got to be tights. I have got to wear a black dress, or I am allowed to change for a bow tie ensemble if I suspected that I might actually be a bloke really under the skin, which I don’t.
It is all going to be very exciting, like being a character in a film about the nineteen fifties.
In other news, I have bathed the dogs, because their pong simply got too much, and is not great even after a bath. Also we have had a night off. This was magnificent. I made us a curry, which turned out perfectly and there is some left in the freezer for the next time we are feeling hedonistic.
We ate too many chocolates and watched a film about the people who developed IVF, which was very nice although I am not sure that I approve of modern films. People go on and on about their feelings all the time. Feelings seem so important that they almost stop everybody from getting on with the stuff they are supposed to be doing, even if it is interesting and worthwhile. I do not know what has happened to the stiff upper lip, people who write films do not seem to have noticed that everybody over the age of twenty five has still got one.
I am not surprised our younger generation is growing up confused.
I have got feelings as well. At the moment I am feeling mildly guilty because of the chocolates but very contented, also because of the chocolates.
I have got a stiff upper lip. I am going to ignore both feelings and go to bed, in the best British Tradition.
